During November 2000 the Asian Human Rights Commission conducted its second workshop on the UN Convention Against Torture, Inhuman, Degrading Treatment of Punishment (CAT), in Bangkok, Thailand. This series of workshops comes at a time when there is growing awareness about the widespread use of torture in Asia, but organised efforts to counter it are lacking.
Legal professionals, human rights activists, religious practitioners and politicians met for five days to share their experiences and concerns, seeking to chalk out ways and means to address torture in Asia. Personal experiences of being held in torture cells or of helping victims to take up their cases in legal forums provoked discussion and posed challenges to the participants.
Though from different religious persuasions – Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu and Christian – the participants profound discussions on violations of human dignity led to deeper interpersonal understanding that paved the way for common reflection. The feeling that emerged was that despite religious differences we all have an inborn responsibility to defend our common humanity. Though states and security systems ostensibly have been created to ensure the safety of all, in actual fact people have been driven to defend themselves against these same systems and their personnel. As was rightly remarked during the seminar, we have reached a point where we have to defend ourselves from police forces that are supposed to protect us.
The exchanges also drew home the conviction that defense and promotion of human rights can be the basis for a meeting point between all religions. Protection of human rights can serve on the one hand to both dispel animosities existing between religious groups and to embark on a common journey to promote human dignity and on the other to obstruct any movements towards extremism. Moreover, the involvement of religious leaders in the prevention of torture and other human rights abuses may augur well for the development of similar programmes among persons working in the legal and medical professions.
To torture someone is not just to violate that person’s rights. It is to break them physically and mentally, to haunt them for the rest of their life. Torture stigmatises and ostracises. Families, spouses and children, must also bear the brunt, left to lead isolated and demoralised lives. The torturer also is made inhuman, perhaps living a double life: a good father at home and a torturer at work. Societies allowing this to happen are likely to repeat the cycle of violence: a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye. Human dignity and social sanity may come only from deterring such actions and establishing measurable systems to effectively prevent torture. Through our campaign against torture we invite everyone to take up this challenge.
Basil Fernando
Philip Setunga
Religious Groups for Human Rights
– A project of the Asian Human Rights Commission
March 2001, Hong Kong
